​May 31Going to work again-- I normally wouldn't today, but my boss's daughter is graduating from high school this morning. Breakfast: lemon water, black coffee, smoothie made from carrot juice, hemp protein powder, peanut butter, canned pumpkin (left over from kid's vegan cookie baking), strawberries and kale. The smoothie is delicious, but distinctly autumnal, between the carrot and pumpkin influences and the intensely-flavored kale. Just like the farm lettuce, the farmer's market kale has a lot more flavor than its supermarket counterparts, even the organic ones. Hopefully the same goes for its nutritional value.

This time I remember to dole out the chocolate tart to my coworkers. At work, I manage a cup of decaf with half and half, and also drink a juice that was made in error by a new employee: cucumber, celery, and apple. It tastes incredibly sweet.

At home again briefly in the afternoon about 2:45, I eat a reprise of my Saturday night diner dinner: big glob of tuna salad with cheese melted on top, some coleslaw, four big onion rings. Also drink a cup of coffee with half and half. Then I have to quickly rush over to the middle school with kid's cookies. I have agreed to meet kid in front of the school at 3:20 (they will get there via the high school school bus). At 3:16, kid texts me: Are you almost here? This happens almost every time kid arrives someplace before I do, even if I am not late. Do cell phones mean that kids cannot be patient for 4 minutes anymore? Do they imagine that their texts will cause our cars to go faster?

A few errands, home again to finish that cup of coffee I started, make another cup, decaf this time. Do some household bookkeeping. Back out to the store.

At 5:00-- or maybe closer to 5:30-- I start baking the "Birthday Cake" from Jennifer Reese's book. This did not go incredibly well. First of all, I forgot to put any salt in the cake. So, while it was OK otherwise (texture, etc.), there was a noticeable lack of flavor. Second, I don't get Reese's "White Mountain Frosting." Why would you make frosting with egg whites? And why didn't my frosting work? It was way too runny. Perhaps the problem comes with the instruction to "beat egg whites until foamy." I feel like I have misjudged "foamy" before. I know what "stiff" is, or "soft peaks," but in a literal sense egg whites become foamy almost immediately. So, I stop beating them, start beating in the sugar syrup. Maybe this is wrong. Anyway, you can see from the photo how I ended up simply pouring the frosting over the top of the cake. It never did do anything except become sticky, like a thin, slick layer of marshmallow fluff; certainly none of the crunchiness Reese mentioned ever came to pass. At least I remembered to put salt in it.

​While the cake sat there in its puddle of sticky white glory, we ate some dinner: open-face egg salad and tomato on whole wheat bakery toast, garnished with parsley; sauteed farmer's market kohlrabi and shiitake mushrooms; sliced Gold Rush apples, also from the market. Then I removed the cake from its puddle and onto a clean tray. It looked somewhat less ridiculous there.

A kohlrabi.

​For dessert, while watching a couple of old episodes of The Office, we ate slices of the cake with vanilla ice cream. It was okay. Not great. Because of the salt.June 1Going to waitress again! Third day in a row. Technically I am only supposed to be working 2 days/week, but I have been home from my trip 8 days and have worked 5 of them. Breakfast: lemon water, coffee with half and half, smoothie made from carrot juice, coconut milk from a carton, plain yogurt, canned pumpkin, hemp protein powder, avocado, strawberries, banana, and kale. I discover that too much canned pumpkin in a smoothie tastes kind of weird.

I bring half of the imperfect, unsalted, sticky cake to work with me on a tray. I don't actually witness anyone eating it, although some people claim that they did and it was good.

At work, I have decaf coffee with half and half, and about half a cup of regular at the end of the shift, while I am rolling silverware. I also buy a side order of bulgogi to take home and use in dinner tonight.

Lunch at home, about 2:45: another cup of coffee with half and half. The rest of the coleslaw (there was a lot of coleslaw!) from Saturday night. The rest of the asparagus pesto from Sunday night, with pickled shallots, eaten with Whole Foods tequila-lime tortilla chips. Small dish of the Japanese snack mix I bought at HMart a while back. After this I have, I think, another cup of decaf with half and half. But it is difficult to say. For some reason this afternoon is a blur.

At dinnertime, I try to create the omelet my husband has been craving: bulgogi and sweet potato. First I cut up the sweet potatoes and roast them at a low temperature (350) in the oven so that they are soft but not excessively caramelized. Then I make omelets with the sweet potatoes and the bulgogi I brought home from the restaurant. On the side we have roasted asparagus from our CSA box (this week's batch was lovely, with incredibly thin stalks), and fruit consisting of CSA strawberries (amazing flavor), cantaloupe, and kiwi. My husband is happy.

Strawberries are the prettiest.

​During our after-dinner walk, we discuss his arrival time home from work. This has a tendency to creep later and later. Originally we agreed that dinnertime was at 7:00. Over time, he began to arrive more like 7:15-7:30. I can live with that. However, lately the new normal has not been until 7:45-8:00. By the time we eat the dinner-- even if I have it ready to go immediately on the table-- wash the dishes, and take our after-dinner walk, it is 9:00, or even later. My kid goes to bed at 9:30 (they have to leave for the bus at 6:45 am), and I tend to go to sleep around 10-10:30. This does not leave much of an evening for family time. My husband agrees. He will try to get home earlier. On a positive note, no matter how late it is, we are committed-- without any need for discussion or negotiation-- to eating a family dinner together. Even my kid does not complain about this, though they sometimes spoil their appetite with snacking. So I should be grateful for a dinner tradition that remains strong.​At 9:15, after our walk, we all watch an episode of The Office together, and I eat my second allotted piece of low-sodium chocolate cake, giving bites to my loved ones on either side, who have already eaten theirs.

Whole Foods Nailed for Unsanitary Conditions in Food Prep PlantEarlier this spring, I tried to research the preparation locations and conditions of Whole Foods prepared foods. Apparently the information I got was wrong, because 1) indeed, there are regional plants that make ready-to-eat foods for multiple stores, and 2) conditions there are not entirely wholesome. Read for details of sanitation violations at their Massachusetts plant.

What 2000 Calories Looks Like​Back to restaurant portion sizes. The New York Times creates visuals for approximately 2000 calories worth of food (assumed to be one day's allotment) at a number of different restaurant chains, as well as at home. Take-home message: cook your own. ...Or (and I hate to even mention this), eat Subway.

The Precarious Reign of the Honeycrisp AppleStrangely, this article is a sponsored post by Chase Bank. I am not at all sure what their relationship might be to the topic, and it would interest me to understand it better. Regardless, this exploration of the past, present and future of the Honeycrisp apple is a fascinating look at how food trends influence agricultural production and retail sales, and can ultimately end up destroying the quality of the very product they aimed to celebrate.

​May 29Breakfast: lemon water first; then a cup of coffee with half and half. Finally, about 9:45 (it's Sunday), I make smoothies for my husband and I: carrot juice, hemp protein powder, avocado, plain yogurt, a few strawberries, a peach, and farm red leaf lettuce. This tastes like a liquid salad. The farm lettuce has a lot more flavor than the romaine I buy at the store.

About 11:45, we decide to head downtown to get brunch at my restaurant. I have an omelette with crab and spring onions inside, broccoli on the side, and an English muffin with butter and jam. 2 cups of coffee with half and half, first a decaf and then a regular. My husband also chooses with careful restraint.

Then we go to the farmer's market, just across the street, where the holiday weekend has made things quieter than usual. It is nice to be able to wander the stalls without the claustrophobia sometimes inherent in fighting one's way through the happy crowd. I buy one big kohlrabi, a paper bag of shiitake mushrooms, a little basket of sweet potatoes, a basket of strawberries, 4 Gold Rush apples (always the first and best in the early summer here), and a bag of kale. We also taste some local wines, then decide on a bottle of hard cider, as a gift for my stepson's girlfriend next time there is a suitable occasion. She likes hard cider and dislikes beer. Total purchases about $40.

In the afternoon, before a 4:00 yoga class, I have a cup of green tea and prepare the Vegan Chocolate Tart with Salted Oat Crust from October's Bon Appetit magazine. It will need to chill for a while, and we'll have it tonight for dessert. The tart is fairly simple to make; I don't have a tart pan, but it works fine in a springform with the crust pressed a little ways up the sides.

Oats 'n' things.

Recipe instructed the cook to melt and then slightly cool the coconut oil before mixing the crust. This is how my coconut oil looked straight out of the cupboard. It is hot in my kitchen.

Crust.

Stirring the chocolate.

My homemade vanilla!

The oat topping.

​Dinner, after the yoga class, is the Egg Tartines with Asparagus Pesto, Dijon and Pickled Shallots from Smitten Kitchen, with a small fruit salad on the side made of orange, peach, and strawberry. I am the only one who has pickled shallots on my tartines. They are good, but their salty vinegariness does kind of overwhelm the subtle flavor of the asparagus pesto. I think I might dial down both the salt and the vinegar next time (and/or use a better vinegar). Still. I like the tartines a lot.

Shallots pickling in the refrigerator.

Included for realism. I do not have a lot of counter space and my appliances are all lined up in a row, except the toaster oven, which is on the opposite counter. Finished tart shares space with incipient tartines.

​For dessert, while we start watching The Force Awakens (my kid has seen this on their own and is really excited to share it with us), we eat small pieces of the chocolate tart. It is incredibly rich and intense, so small pieces are exactly what we want. The chocolate is so, so dark, and the coconut oil with which it is blended is so smooth. Totally decadent. I will save another piece each for tomorrow, then take the remainder to work.

May 30Memorial Day and another work day for me. An ordinary breakfast: lemon water, coffee with half and half, a smoothie made from carrot juice, hemp protein powder, canned coconut milk, plain yogurt, farmer's market strawberries, and CSA farm red leaf lettuce.

Then I go to work, and work I do, very hard. It is busy from the get-go. I do manage to drink a cup of decaf coffee with half and half, over the course of the day, but it is so busy that I forget to offer my coworkers any of the chocolate tart that I have brought and left in the refrigerator. Tomorrow. I leave a little late, about 2:45.​At home, I make coffee, eat a lunch of leftover pasta with oregano pesto and the other half of my tuna melt from Saturday night. After that, I have a cup of peppermint tea. I am exhausted, more than I realized while I was actually working. And sore, and I have cramps and my whole body hurts. Especially and also feet. Eventually I recover and start working on dinner, which has to be begun early, because the beans need long cooking.

Oh, and when I got home from work, my kid was baking. They were making vegan cookies (their girlfriend is vegan) frosted in the colors of various Pride flags. 4 rainbow, 3 non-binary, 3 trans, 3 pansexual, and maybe one or two other things, I forget. Tomorrow is the end-of-year party for the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) at their old middle school, an organization my kid and her girlfriend personally started last year. The club is still going strong, and my kid will be paying a guest visit, with cookies.

Possibly inspired by those juggling balls, on left?

​Dinner is Madhur Jaffrey's Spinach with Tomato (Saag) recipe, some black beans with Indian-ish flavorings, whole wheat pitas, and plain yogurt. The black beans are still a little undercooked by the time we eat; also, I added too much seasoning, I feel. My kid, however, says they especially like them. I'm glad to know they (the beans, not the kid) are not inherently unpleasant. The saag has a good flavor. I've used a couple of the fresh onions from the farm, complete with scapes, instead of yellow onions. I'm always stunned, though, at how much spinach has to be purchased in order to make a substantial spinach dish like this. For the saag, which made about 5 decent side-dish servings, I used some spinach from the CSA farm in addition to 2 full 1 lb. containers from Whole Foods. Those are the big containers. The smaller boxes and bags are typically 5 oz. Over $10 worth of spinach. I guess that is still only $2/serving, less than you would pay in a restaurant... but somehow painful when you are laying down $20 on spinach on a single shopping trip (there is another spinach recipe to come, later in the week).

​In the evening after dinner, while watching the rest of The Force Awakens, I eat my second allotted piece of chocolate tart.

I hadn't thought this through. I wanted to illustrate a post with side-by-side comparisons of portion sizes in U.S. restaurants (and other food establishments) vs. portion sizes in other countries. But, of course, I don't have a source of those side-by-side illustrations, and I don't find them readily available elsewhere. Clearly somebody needs to pay me to do some international travel and take pictures of my food.

So, we do what we can. Let's just talk portion size a little bit. I've recently complained about the insanely huge portion sizes I received the other day at a traditional American diner, on an occasion when I was deliberately trying to order something small. Imagine if I had tried to maximize my value! What a platter I could have had!

It seemed to me that the best way to gain perspective on our American restaurant portions was to consult the impressions of international travelers and freshly minted residents who may be new to our overstuffed way of life. My reading immediately became anecdotal and complicated. However, one theme immediately leapt out: behind our backs, foreigners joke among themselves about how "everything is bigger in America." (That's a link to a 5-minute video of young people browsing the produce section for the first time at an American mega-supermarket. Oh dear, oh dear.) Not only platters are bigger, but onions, cars, houses, and waistlines. As well as the country itself, whose sheer land area defeats the imagination of travelers from many smaller nations.

But, definitely, platters. And drinks. Because McDonald's gives us a standardized product against which to measure relative portions, much has been made of the difference in soda cup size among nations. In a short and unnecessarily manic video, the Daily Mail shows us that U.S. "large"-sized cups are 1.5 times the size of those sold in Japan. "'For soda, the glasses [in the U.S.] are huge," says [Anne-Pierre] Pickaert, a native of France. 'It's like a vase. I can't see how somebody can be so thirsty. [...] A milk container here looks like a petrol container in France,' says Pickaert, 'even the way it has that handle.' In France, the biggest [milk container] you can get is a liter and a half."

This is milk.

This is an American gas can. Perhaps French ones look different.

International visitors also express shock over the American custom of taking food home from restaurants in doggy bags (a custom that is only possible because we routinely serve more food than many people can eat). A French restaurant-goer: "What surprised me in several states of USA was, over volume of food, very low price, & the special amazing culture to take the reminder of food well packed to home! this is something unimaginable in France even if the food was much more than habit."

Another way that Americans are encouraged to eat more: buy in bulk. And the thing is, we are so accustomed to this cultural phenomenon that we do not even notice that it might seem irrational to others. For instance, this Indian immigrant says: ​

​

The way that stores price their products makes no apparent economic sense, and is not linear at all.

Americans are encouraged to buy in bulk, which often leads to a lot of waste.

This person is buying a lot of bottled beverages.

Well, of course! we say as Americans. Of course unit prices decline as the size of the package gets larger, or store specials sometimes offer a lower price if you buy 2 or 3 of the same item. That's the way sales works! But why? Clearly this Indian observer expects unit price to stay consistent, independent of quantity. There's no reason that is not perfectly logical. And the economic incentive to buy larger quantities of food almost certainly translates to greater consumption and portion sizes once the food is brought home. We have often commented on this phenomenon in our family: if we have what we perceive as an overabundance of a certain food in our house, we will consume it like crazy, thereby at least partially negating any cost savings.

Moving away a bit from portion size, international visitors comment on other aspects of the American diet that lead to overconsumption of calories. Asian travelers, in particular, complain about the calorie-dense nature of American food. A Chinese nutritionist who had recently relocated to the U.S. said "'I couldn't get full [...] I'm used to the bulk in the Chinese diet'— clear soup with a lot of vegetables, for instance, that lend satiety without adding a lot of calories." A skinny Chinese international student was astounded by the amount of sugar on offer: "The desserts in America are much sweeter than I expected before I actually came here and tasted it. Some sweets are like choking on sugar and American chefs are really generous on using sugar. [...] Looking back, I was amazed by how sweet my shake from Dairy Queen was compared to the same thing that I got in China; same with the regular cookies, donuts, etc. But by now I have totally gotten used to the sweetness and enjoy it."

The Peanut Buster Parfait was always my favorite as a child.

​"Choking on sugar." It is almost painful to hear that, and yet I know she is right. When I have given up sugar for a few weeks or months on a cleanse diet, the first sweets that I reintroduce seem almost shockingly, unpleasantly sugary. Everyone knows that we can become desensitized to salty tastes, so that some people like their food very, very salty; we don't talk as much about how we are desensitized to sweetness. When the Korean immigrants I work with offer me something they define as dessert, sometimes my American palate cannot even discern sweetness in it. On the flip side, the fancy cakes and cookies I sometimes bring to the restaurant probably overwhelm them. The heavy-set Salvadorean cook eats that stuff up, as much as I will bring her, but the skinny Koreans take a tiny slice, smile, and say they'll "have it with coffee" (meaning: later, and diluted with some non-sweet taste to make it bearable).

(Incidentally. There is a large Salvadorean immigrant population here in my area, and, man, do those people have a lot of bakeries and pastry shops. And pupuserias. Mainly serving other Salvadorean immigrants. So I can't claim that the U.S. is the only country with such a calorie-dense food culture. But even the Salvadorean sweet buns, of which there are many varieties, seem to me only "lightly sweet" compared to your typical American pastry.)

Finally, I will leave you with the words of another, possibly Brazilian?, commenter, who focuses on the overall infantilization of American food culture: "Infantile and convenient food (and I'm not talking about the fast food): no bones, no spines, hardly ever find an entire fish, it's mostly filets, very little diversity (little lamb, or duck, hardly ever rabbit, and for fish it's almost always tuna, salmon, haddock and bass), seedless everything. A lot of things (not desserts) are sweetened, like honey smoked, glazed, etc. Even desserts sometimes look like 5-y.o. were left alone in the kitchen: cookie dough ice cream, oreo cheese cake..."

I will attest that I am, as charged, by-and-large too lazy to eat fish with spines or grapes with seeds. Even watermelon is a drag. Does this mark me as quintessentially American: a nation of elementary-aged picky eaters who have grown up to consume adult quantities of fish sticks and "baby" carrots and ice cream sundaes? I sell plenty of chicken tenders to adults in my restaurant, lots of macaroni and cheese. There are people who want us to butter their toast for them, or cut their sandwiches into quarters. Maybe this guy has a point. Everybody's a baby in America. A giant baby.

This childlike food culture idea is making me rethink the whole smoothies-for-breakfast habit we have established lately. Could there be a more labor-free food delivery system? Fruits and vegetables you don't have to cut or peel yourself while eating, raw greens that don't need to be cooked or dressed, no utensils required... heck, you don't even have to chew. I recently bought us some stainless steel straws, in case sipping is too burdensome. Giant babies.

This is somebody else's photo of their plate at the Metro 29. We had a lot more fries than that. But it gives the general idea.

​Breakfast (before work, 6:30 am): lemon water, coffee with half and half, smoothie made from pomegranate juice, carrot juice, canned coconut milk, hemp protein powder, strawberries, and farm lettuce. That doesn't sound awfully filling, but it held me through most of the day somehow. Maybe the heat.

At work: cup of decaf coffee with half and half, a couple of swallows of strawberry-pineapple juice, cup of regular coffee with half and half. A customer ordered something they called a "London Fog"-- then described it as steamed milk with Earl Grey tea in it-- so I had a few leftover sips of that too, since it sounded interesting.

Lunch (3:45 pm, brought home from the restaurant): the cooks made me a mega-serving of the food I ordered-- japchae with bulgogi on top and some extra asian-style green beans thrown in. I appreciate that they like me (some of my coworkers complain of being given tiny servings), but, as I keep telling them, they are going to make me fat. I told Mrs. Park that I would eat some and save the rest for breakfast, but of course I ate it all.

We waited to eat dinner until late, after we went to see a musical (Caroline, or Change) assistant-directed by my stepson. It was an interesting show that we had to talk about afterwards, and also there were some stellar singers. The talking took place at the Metro 29 Diner in Arlington, so aggressively air-conditioned that my husband had to give me his shirt to wrap around myself. I wanted something small, just a sandwich and decaf. But all sandwiches that were of any interest to me came with fries. I wanted a tuna melt. I asked if I could substitute anything for the fries, decided on coleslaw, and received a massive platter with an open-face tuna melt (meaning about double the tuna and cheese you would normally find on the sandwich), a pile of lettuce and tomatoes on the side, a small cup of coleslaw, a much larger dish of additional coleslaw, a pickle, and four onion rings. My husband did want a sandwich and fries, received a large sandwich, a huge pile of fries, a small cup of coleslaw, a pickle, and four onion rings. We took home two big styrofoam boxes, one with some of his fries and most of the onion rings, and the other with half a tuna melt, an additional pile of tuna-with-cheese that I had scraped off the other half of the open-face sandwich so that I could put the two pieces of bread together, and a giant pile of coleslaw. I think we wasted my husband's pickle, as he doesn't like them and we didn't take it home. My husband speculated about what foreigners would say about ridiculous American serving sizes if they ate at the Metro 29. Speaking of American wastefulness, even the waitress, who was working hard, complained of being cold in this over-air-conditioned restaurant. My Korean immigrant employer, who was today complaining to me about how much food Americans waste, and also keeps his restaurant at a tropical 82 degrees, would be appalled.

Other snacks: cup of decaf coffee with half and half in the afternoon after work.

​May 25Breakfast: coffee with half and half, smoothie made with prune juice, RiceDream horchata, hemp protein powder, avocado, perfectly ripe cantaloupe, a kiwi that I bought two weeks ago which never got ripe, and romaine lettuce. This is "back to normal?" But, yet, it feels good to be back here.

Lunch (after work, 2:45): Leftover chili, one fried egg.

Dinner (kinda late, prepared after I get home from yoga at 7:30): two pieces of Rudi's multigrain bread, with slices of swiss cheese melted on top. Sauteed sugar snap peas, sweet peppers, and (farm!) asparagus. Salad of romaine lettuce and grape tomatoes with balsamic vinaigrette. Even though I was hungry two hours later, it again feels good to get back to eating more vegetables and fewer cookies. The asparagus tasted extra-special; I don't think it was just our imagination. Kid agreed. It was a lot younger and fresher than what we tend to buy at the store.Snacks: 3 other cups of coffee, 2 decaf, 1 regular, with half and half. Two rice cakes when I had the munchies before bed.

May 26Breakfast: water with lemon juice in it, coffee with half and half, smoothie made from a little bit of RiceDream horchata, lemonade, hemp protein powder, avocado, cantaloupe, farm strawberries, and farm spinach. This was one of my favorite smoothies ever. The lemonade was an awesome base (although maybe I could achieve the same thing with less sugar by just adding some lemon juice??), the cantaloupe (as previously mentioned) was perfectly ripe, and the strawberries and spinach were super-fresh. The spinach, especially, seemed to create a brighter, greener smoothie than bagged spinach. Yum!

Lunch: An impromptu pasta dish made from a) some plain noodles my kid cooked while I was gone, which were now languishing in the back of the refrigerator, b) butter, c) sliced carrots, and d) a sprinkling of ancient feta cheese. Plain, but surprisingly delicious. Side of cantaloupe.

Dinner: I'm kind of full from all the sushi and injulmi (see snacks below), but eat one of what my husband and I tend to call "Indian burritos," which I'd asked him to put in the oven when he got home from work, 3 kim-bob, and 4 slices of orange. Then I am really full.

Snacks: 3 other cups coffee, 1 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half. A couple of pieces of swiss cheese before morning yoga class (when I arrived back at work after my trip, a customer had left me a block of swiss cheese, reportedly brought back from a trip to the midwest. It had a post-it with my name on it, in his spidery old-man handwriting. Advantages of working at a neighborhood joint for a long time). At mall food court with kid, at 6 pm after grueling shopping trip: shared sushi combo, shared steamed dumplings. Mall food court sushi was not that bad. Approximately 7 pm, after stopping at HMart for groceries, while driving home: about half a dozen injulmi (kid ate the entire rest of the package, spoiling their dinner). Small glass of lemonade before bed, because it is hot in the house and I am incredibly thirsty.

May 27Breakfast: water with fresh lemon (how much better this is than bottled lemon, or lime, or plain water); coffee with half and half; smoothie made from lemonade, pomegranate juice, plain yogurt, hemp protein powder, peanut butter, cantaloupe, banana and spinach.

After breakfast and before yoga I make an extensive shopping list, consulting recipes and not just inventorying pantry basics. So excited to get cooking again! But worried that I have three different desserts in the works. I'll need to make a plan to get rid of the excess. (Seriously, a birthday cake? But then I'll be finished with Jennifer Reese's book and I can start something new! Maybe Indian curries. They are probably healthier, sorry Jen.)

Dinner: A couple of suggestions made by our CSA farmer regarding the use of this week's vegetables resulted in the following meal: ziti pasta, with bright green ziti-shaped chunks of fresh onion scape, plus a few shiitake mushrooms, and served with fresh oregano pesto (oregano, almonds, parmesan, olive oil, garlic). Side salad of farm lettuce with sweet peppers and balsamic vinaigrette. It would never have occurred to me to make oregano pesto-- don't I have to cook the leaves first, I thought, won't they be fuzzy?-- but it was absolutely fine. I only ate a small amount of pasta, then ate a little more before bed.

​Snacks: cup of peppermint tea, 2 cups of coffee (1 regular, 1 decaf) with half and half. A bunch of Whole Foods house-made tortilla chips and some guacamole, first while driving home in the car after shopping and then after unpacking the groceries. I like those chips a lot, but more to the point I was starving. However, it is so hot outside and in the house that my stomach starts cramping up and I don't feel like eating, anymore. 93 degrees. Small dish of additional pasta before bed, as previously mentioned-- I got hungrier once it started to cool off.

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while. Somehow I never feel like getting around to it. But yesterday morning I read that it was "World Eating Disorders Action Day"-- whatever that means, really-- and so it seems like the right time. Time to get it over with.

Ladies. (And gentlemen, but I don't feel qualified to write about gentlemen.) Is there anyone, at least anyone of our generation (I'm 44), who has NOT, at some point in their lives, developed fucked-up eating patterns (or starving patterns, or purging patterns, or food-obsessional patterns) that would qualify as an eating disorder? Obviously, some of us have suffered more intensely, or endangered our health more seriously, than others. But, on a very large scale, something went terribly wrong with the way whole generations of women interacted with food and nourishment.

Here's a quick history of me. When I was a little girl-- about 10 years old-- I started counting calories. I had some baby fat, the kind that hangs on right before you hit puberty and sprout into a lovely teenager. Most of my friends were a bit older, and I think I felt that, like them, I should already be a lovely teenager. I don't remember anybody pointing out that I, too, would probably become lovely in a couple of years. Probably they didn't really get what my problem was: that I still looked soft and formless in a way that didn't fit right in designer jeans or bikinis.

Among my mom's recipe books on the shelf, she had a paperback that purported to tell you exactly how many calories were in things. How many in one chicken breast. How many in 1/2 a cup of ice cream. How many in one grape. This was part two of the problem. The grownup women of this period were collecting diet books, going to Gloria Stevens at the mall to have their thighs jiggled, and trying to cook without fat. Ultimately, the grownups moved on from these trends, but-- unbeknownst to them-- many of them have daughters who now know, off the top of their heads, exactly how many calories are in everything. Just like the capital cities of the U.S., which I learned at about the same time, this information is in my brain forever.

When my mom tried to diet with her calorie-counting book, she aimed for 1200 calories a day, so I did too. I remember evenings when, looking for an after-dinner snack, I parceled out my remaining 33 or 56 allotted calories into a certain number of peapods or strawberries. 1200 exactly, that was the goal. I don't know if my mom was this precise in her own diet, but I doubt it. Calorie counting fitted in nicely with my general tendency towards monitoring, measuring, regimentation. I am still this way. At 44, I have figured out some ways to make it work for me, but compulsive monitoring is still a beast that needs to be carefully tamed.

So... yeah, I write this blog in which I record absolutely everything I eat. That is totally different.

Anyway. Back to 10. I probably overestimate in my mind how much of the time I was "on a diet" at this age. Because there were also plenty of times I came home from school and whipped up a quick bowl of "cookie dough" (really just the flour and sugar and milk, I rarely bothered with butter or eggs), and ate that while I watched my soaps and late-afternoon comedy reruns. Or ice cream. Lots and lots of Breyers mint chocolate chip ice cream. Afterwards, my beloved cat Louie licked the bowl.

I was a pretty enough teenager and young woman, neither fat nor thin. I would give a lot to be able to go back and appreciate the way I looked then, enjoy that body while I had it. But, like most of us, I spent much more energy on hate and disgust. With my short, solid build, my thighs looked thick in a bathing suit. I had a weak double chin in profile. My hips were wide in relation to my waist, making jeans-shopping difficult in the juniors' stores.

I knew I looked more or less okay, though. So the disgust was about much more than looks. It was about lack of self-control, the essential wrongness of eating secret candy bars and chips from the vending machines at college (I hid them in my shirt so people wouldn't know how many I was buying), the shame of whole pints of Ben & Jerry's. I realize that my version of binging was pretty tame (a whole box of macaroni and cheese? Two apple fritters from the supermarket?). There was no purging, only guilt. But the pattern remained, throughout high school and college. There was the bad, uncontrolled girl, the weak girl, who ate ice cream and giant bowls of buttered popcorn and, that one time, hoarded an entire birthday cake and giant fruit basket in her dorm room and didn't go to class or the dining hall for a week, preferring to stay in the dark and reread Jane Eyre. And then there was the virtuous girl, who tried to undo all that by diets and resolutions, by choosing, on one occasion when she went to her mom's house for a meal, to have only a single glass of milk for dinner. Which one of these was the real girl? Oh surely, surely the former.

For me, as for so many people, none of this was front-and-center, not really. The drama of food was a backdrop to the drama of life, making me feel vaguely bad about myself and filling up the empty corners of time with little binges and little pledges.

And then there came anorexic autumn.

What happened was simple enough. I got sad. First, I graduated from college. A summer ensued, a summer of drifting and flailing. Plans were made, plans cancelled. I attended half of a Chinese poetry course, then dropped it. My best friend and I admitted we were not actually going to move together to Portland, Oregon. I drove around Maine and Vermont, looking for a town I wanted to move to, by myself. I took a road trip with my college boyfriend, who was an emotional leech I couldn't wait to be rid of and couldn't seem to unequivocally dump. Then, I was alone in the house, my parents' house. They had gone away on some international trip, for several weeks. I was meant to pack up in the meantime, drive to Brunswick, Maine, find an apartment.

Instead, some other stuff happened. I hooked up with an old boyfriend who lived in town, finally dumped college guy once and for all. The hooking up was more emotionally gripping for me than for old boyfriend. It made me a) not want to leave town, b) not want to leave his couch, and c) feel very sad when it became clear he was not serious about me, as usual. Also. If I was not leaving town, I had to find a fucking job. All the stress and sadness made me not feel like eating. Actually, it became a struggle just to ingest something, to chew and swallow. The new routine, while I sat in my parents' empty house, in my stepfather's favorite armchair, became this: coffee, coffee, coffee. Cook a frozen burrito for lunch, cut it in half, eat half very slowly. Save the other half to choke down for dinner. Coffee, coffee. The other half of the frozen burrito. Cry.

I found a job through the unemployment office. It was a terrible job, working nights in a basement in the dark, answering phones. Soon it also involved two other factors: 1) sleeping with my boss, and 2) an awareness that the business was somehow a cover for something else. Something was wrong-- wrong with the business, and wrong with the boss, who carried a little pistol in a fancy holster under his jacket. I'd wondered why he always went into another room to take off his clothes. This is a true story.

All of it didn't do much for my appetite. I'd bring lunches to work that consisted of things like: 3 cherry tomatoes, a few slices of cucumber, and 6 saltines. But I skipped most meals. Occasionally my coworkers would send me out for fast food (for them) and I'd randomly eat a bacon cheeseburger. But mostly I lived on coffee and adrenaline. And I lost a lot of weight, along with a certain amount of hair. All kinds of jeans and other clothes fit perfectly now, even those in the juniors' section. Even while miserable in my sinister job, first dating and then not-dating my confusing and well-armed boss, pining for my erstwhile boyfriend who wasn't interested in anything besides hooking up, and facing an entire adult life full of uncertainty-- even while looking in the bathroom mirror at the way my hair had gone flat, and my skin dry and colorless-- I celebrated my weight loss. It was a victory pulled from the jaws of defeat.​After a few months, I left that job for something healthier, and the ability to eat also gradually returned. But now emotional not-eating was part of my arsenal, along with emotional eating, and it was a weapon I could sometimes use to deal with pain. I still got to express my feelings somatically, but not-eating had the advantage of making me feel strong, not weak; virtuous, not guilty. Chaos, stress, and sadness, bad break-up? I could go the ascetic route, eat very little, sleep on the floor, refuse to indulge in ordinary comforts until I was ready to feel comforted. I learned to moderate not-eating so that I could cast myself as waif-like but not become ill or unattractive. In my mid-twenties, cigarettes made an inevitable entrance. By then, I ate what I wanted, but at unreasonably long intervals, and smoking (and, still, coffee) filled the gaps. Smoking was perfect because it was both emotional eating and not-eating. Oral fixation? Check. Waifish? Check. Zero calories? Check.

Fortunately for me and my health, in my late twenties I also got married and then got pregnant. I quit smoking. I started eating more. I gained 10 pounds at first, then another 70 pounds in nine months of pregnancy.

As a mom and a woman running a household, my relationship with food changed utterly then. Suddenly, food was a resource to be managed for the good of all; it was a source of positive nourishment; for a family of four living on a low income, it was not to be taken for granted. I stopped engaging in either emotional eating or emotional not-eating. I ate what was available to eat and what would not take key resources out of the mouths of my family. And I ate regularly, in order to keep my energy levels consistent, and function as a parent, worker and student all at the same time. It finally became apparent to me that food was fuel. Food made milk for my baby; a banana or piece of cheese kept me from losing my shit when I was forced to be awake at 2 am. My then-husband came home on his lunch break and fueled his insanely high metabolism with eggs, peanut butter, and cereal. Our foster teenager asked nothing more than a bottomless supply of ramen noodle packets, and this worried me, because he wasn't getting proper nutrition. What kind of hypocrisy was this?

Most of the 70 pounds fell right back off again, but the new attitude stayed. I was still neither fat nor thin. I was still short and sturdy. But there were now so many things more important than my weight.

But wait... wasn't I still obsessed with food? I can't remember precisely when I first decided that I would cook every single recipe in the cookbooks I owned (an impossible task), starting with... which one? Maybe this one. I read book after book about organic gardening and farming. I began to write regularly about food politics on the progressive blog Daily Kos. I thought about food. I watched documentaries about food. After I split up with my first husband and had more disposable income of my own, I bought better quality food, joined a CSA, spent three years as a professional cheesemonger. I worked out regularly and ate pretty much whatever I enjoyed.

That was a (relatively) healthy time.

And now... I am not sure. Some things have changed. I still like cooking my way through cookbooks (okay, feel compelled to cook my way through cookbooks); I belong to a CSA and buy high-quality food for the most part. I write about food still, though in a different way. But middle-aged spread means I have gone back to worrying about my weight, and I don't work out or run as much, and I am prone to going on "cleanses" or special diets (while claiming they are healthful diets and not for weight loss). A focus on nutrition or food-as-medicine, and in particular our national focus on eliminating certain foods (sugar, gluten, dairy) has become a preoccupation to replace counting calories (though, shh, I still make approximations of calories in my head). In extreme cases, this preoccupation even has a name: orthorexia.

People! Please take note of this. I find that almost no one I know has heard of it, even though everyone knows, in a sense, what I mean. But I am a waitress in a town filled with health nuts and vegetarians, and I can definitely affirm that this disorder is becoming more prevalent every moment. It is encouraged, too, in the media, who have largely replaced a discourse about the desirability of thinness with one about the desirability of healthy or "clean" eating. It doesn't matter what exactly your obsession is, whether calories or organics or gluten (and yes, I know some people really have celiac disease-- my sister, for example)-- if you are spending all your time thinking about what you put in your mouth, and don't have a good medical reason to do so, you are flirting with an eating disorder.

When my husband is depressed and my first instinct is to nag him about whether he's been drinking too much milk, my perspective may be skewed.

So here I am, with my blog (almost) entirely about food, and my time-consuming daily food diary, and my compulsive approach to recipes, chronicling the story of how I finally developed a healthy relationship with food. Eating is important. Yes. But is it that important? A question I should remember to ask myself periodically. If you have bothered to read this far, perhaps you should too. Happy (day after) World Eating Disorders Action Day.